After the Moon debacle (the fact no one has ever returned there after 40 years is very strange), do we really believe a Mars mission will actually happen?

As the last man to walk on the moon prepared to fly back to Earth in 1972, astronaut Eugene Cernan echoed the words of the first, pledging with Neil-Armstrong-like grandiosity that “we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.” He later predicted that humans would reach Mars by the end of the 20th century.

Now Cernan admits: “I was a little off on my timing.”

Forty-two years after Cernan’s Apollo 17 mission touched down, not a single person has walked on the moon. A Mars landing is surely decades away, at best. And not a single space ship designed to carry astronauts has left Low Earth Orbit.

But at 7:05 Thursday morning, NASA is scheduled to take what it calls a huge step toward advancing the nation’s human space flight program, with the much-anticipated first test flight of the Orion spacecraft.

If all goes according to plan, the uncrewed Orion, manufactured by Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin, would blast off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., orbit the Earth twice, hitting an altitude of about 3,600 miles above the surface of the planet. That’s farther than any spacecraft designed for humans has gone in more than 40 years.